


The Love Song of A. Z. Fell

by PaleBlueEis



Series: an age at least to every part [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Asexuality Spectrum, Aziraphale Is Trying (Good Omens), Aziraphale Loves Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale is Bad at Feelings (Good Omens), Aziraphale talks to his books, Aziraphale's Bookshop (Good Omens), Communication is not everyone's strong suit, Demisexual Aziraphale (Good Omens), Hobnobs of Infinite Poignancy, Idiots in Love, Ineffable Idiots (Good Omens), Lists, M/M, Pajamas are a Love Language, Poetry, Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), self help
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:46:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27141286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaleBlueEis/pseuds/PaleBlueEis
Summary: In the midst of welcoming back to his shelves new friends and old, the Principality of a Resurrected First Octavo Format King James Bible made the unwelcome discovery of a far more visibly positioned and plentiful self-help section than he’d ever have tolerated of his own volition.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: an age at least to every part [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1981162
Comments: 15
Kudos: 38





	1. talking to the books

**Author's Note:**

> Stories can be read on their own but work better in the series.
> 
> In this story, Aziraphale is romantically inclined, highly sensual, and not opposed to sex, at least not in theory. It's also not a priority.
> 
> Ratings may change later in the series, but not within a story.

“Heavens,” said Aziraphale, catching his breath. He shut the door, leaned against it, and closed his eyes a moment, savoring. “That all came off rather well.”

Whether he meant muddling up Armageddon, pulling one over on Heaven and Hell, or having an almost intolerably lovely meal with his Infernal Adversary and sometime Ambulatory Buttered Crumpet, the Demon Crowley, he wasn’t even certain.

Not thirty-six hours previously, none of those accomplishments had seemed remotely possible, however ardently they might have been wished for. And having achieved them all, if Aziraphale couldn’t swear as to which of the three he was most pleased about, he also felt very little inclination to try to figure it out.

There were more pressing matters.

He had Work To Do. He needed to take stock, assess progress, and set new goals—which should already attest to his willingness to sacrifice his personal comfort, if need be. The _language alone._

A poem or two first, perhaps (not Eliot), a corrective for the linguistic wasteland (also not Eliot) that lay ahead. Arguing with Crowley about poetry and brandy had been somewhat more stressful than such a thing might sound, and it was always preferable to smooth things over with poetry before it had the opportunity to get into a proper sulk. That never ended well. Poetry could nurse a resentment like few other genres.

As for this evening’s Incident of the Misapplied Marvell, after the terrible difficulty involving pacing and carnality—neither likely to be winning topics for Aziraphale, he ought to know better—that conversation had ended on a more positive note. Partly, he liked to think, as the result of his new…best not to call it an effort, which could lead to all sorts of confusion. A new approach, then, that thus far had the advantage of not leading to hurled rejections and recriminations or decades of near radio silence.

Kiss and make up? No, not with Aziraphale’s native skill and comfort in the Pacing and Carnality departments. But they had leaned rather more emphatically in one another’s direction on the walk home than in times past.

Lovingly tracing the contours of books and shelves as he passed them, Aziraphale made his way to the poetry section. “Not you,” he said sternly to a particularly insinuating _Collected T. S. Eliot._ “’That is not what I meant at all.’ As you bloody well know,” he added, gaze traveling. “Nor you, my dear,” he said more affectionately to an unassuming edition of _A Shropshire Lad_. “Not setting the right tone just now.” He settled on Emily Dickinson. “They’re _short_ ,” he explained to a somewhat dejected-looking clothbound volume _._ “Hang it all, Robert Browning,” he muttered, “There can be but the one _Sordello,_ ’ which is more than enough for anyone, I expect.”

Aziraphale stopped dead in his tracks. _What._

Gently, so gently, he removed the sad little book from the shelf. It wasn’t just sad. It was unmistakably…drab. “How on earth—” he cradled it. “You’re certainly not the young Antichrist’s doing, despite what anyone reading English at Oxford might say.” The spine was quite damaged. He wouldn’t risk opening it without the proper equipment to hand, but he could see well enough what it was. “1840, one of five hundred copies, and still in _drab boards_?” he asked the book, “I can hardly believe I shelved you in the open section, I do beg your pardon. I’ve been distracted of late.” He shuffled off to his desk where the preserving supplies were. “This—”

He paused again. “I’m sorry, old thing. Speaking of distraction. I mustn’t let myself get side-tracked or I’ll never get to that—business in the back room. You’ve been waiting for a hundred and eighty years, I’m sure you can wait a little while longer.” He laid the book affectionately on his desk.

Looking back towards the poetry shelves, he called over his shoulder, “Sorry to cancel, dear Miss Dickinson. Another time, soon. If it’s any consolation, I believe I could recite “’Hope’ is a thing with feathers’” all the way through tonight without so much as a sniffle.”

Aziraphale made himself a small pot of Angel’s Dream tea—eleven-year old boy humor was a laugh a minute—and turned with some trepidation towards the back room, his hastily assembled stack of paperbacks, and the notes he’d jotted that afternoon. Settling in with his notebook, he ticked off a few items scrawled in a list, smiled to himself with satisfaction, and turned the page. His brow furrowed. “Oh. Perhaps not so well on that one, then.” Finding the next blank space, he opened a nearby paperback from the little pile, swallowed hard, and began writing, following along the book’s terminally earnest print with his index finger. 

After some moments of scrawling, Aziraphale broke off and sucked on the end of his pen. “On the other hand, he’s always trying to make me feel better. It might not be down to an error in presentation.”

It was very difficult to know, and somehow none of this came naturally to him at all. The angel sighed and put his face in his hands. If Crowley were here, he’d make Aziraphale laugh. He’d say something perceptive and kind without seeming to say it. It was a bit of a dance, but Aziraphale _liked_ dancing, for all that his repertoire was somewhat limited.

He _liked_ how he and Crowley were, how they could spend hours—days—centuries—talking about everything from the status of Evil, to the relative merits of a Rhone Blend or Grenache base in a Chateauneuf-du-Pape, to whether peanut butter was sacrilegious, and never, ever get bored, not once since the beginning of the world.

Aziraphale closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and let himself smile. Crowley would ask him to go away together again, and Aziraphale would say yes like a rational being. Or perhaps they’d meet up in Paris, in that café near the Luxembourg gardens where they’d sit outside to watch passersby and argue over who was destined for Above or Below. Crowley would tease Aziraphale about liking crepes too much to keep his head on straight without help, and then he’d order another plate of them, with Grand Marinier this time, knowing Aziraphale had had trouble choosing between that and the lemon sugar. Aziraphale would enjoy each tender and sweet and bitter mouthful as the gift it was, not quite failing to notice how Crowley watched his mouth as he did so. Not quite failing to notice how Crowley’s enjoyment deepened his own.

Then perhaps they’d test their Chateauneuf-du-Pape theories as evening spread out against the sky like something absolutely lovely and not at all like a patient of any sort. And then maybe—maybe Aziraphale would take Crowley’s hand as it rested on the table, trace his knuckles as he had earlier this evening, but for longer than 2.37 seconds. Maybe he’d even rap them with a coffee spoon again—on reflection, Crowley’s reaction had been intriguing and worth exploring further, given time and world enough.

Perhaps all that would happen. It could happen, if Aziraphale didn’t do something like tell Crowley they weren’t friends and that he didn’t like him, and then not have the… _balls_ to say the opposite, not directly, not even after having written down that very thing on his blasted to-do list only hours beforehand.

Taking up the notebook again, the angel continued evaluating the list in question.

He was making progress, and he must (he had been earnestly assured by paperbacks) give himself credit when that happened.

He had, after all, managed an only slightly elliptical apology, a big step up from sitting like a flailing fish out of water mouthing mute nothings until Crowley swooped in to rescue him from the Bastille of his own awkwardness.

Aziraphale threw the pen down on the table before him and watched balefully as it rolled around over the sheaves of paper and more interesting works of literature scattered there. This was worse than the bloody Bastille, and Crowley didn’t know to rescue him because Aziraphale was taking every precaution to ensure Crowley never had any idea he was _in_ this bullet-point prison of his own making.

It would be easy enough to rely on the unsaid. Crowley would let him. Crowley would _help_ him. Crowley, in fact, seemed to prefer it, considering how he tended to react to kind words or the slightest expression of pain from Aziraphale.

Maybe that would have been all right, if Aziraphale were similarly hesitant about saying very cruel things. With those, however, he managed to be quite direct.

The angel sank forward again and rubbed his head in his hands. He couldn’t account for it. He _loved_ Crowley. Had for ages. Yes, he’d also been afraid it would get them both discorporated or worse, but that didn’t explain why a demon was so much less capable of cruelty than the angel who adored him.

So here he was, taking notes on the Five Characteristics of Emotional Hogwash.

And there he had been night before—before trading bodies, before Hell-bathing, before a marathon lunch for the ages that ended in a delightful stroll through Soho—asking for guidance. Not with any special circle or summons, not drawing on any inside track, but simply from Crowley’s balcony, in the sole company of a particularly verdant and somewhat flirtatious spider plant.

Spurred on by the real fear that he or Crowley might not survive the following day, the angel had prayed for grace, direction along a better path, and time enough to follow it.

Aziraphale had concerns about his own behavior, and he was well aware that the Heavenly Host had some rather more stringent complaints. But God had been known to listen to people with far worse track records than an angel with some reasonable grounds for confusion who'd got flustered and been unkind. 

He hadn’t been given an answer, of course, but at least he’d made the effort (so to speak).

Then sleep-slow Crowley had appeared in the door, mussed and a bit grouchy, mumbling that while he appreciated Aziraphale had gone outdoors to indulge his habit, he was getting second-hand prayer all the way down to his bedroom. Aziraphale followed him inside, wittering apologetically, and settled down with a cup of tea and Jane Austen, which he found more immediately comforting, in any case.

Austen novels, after all, were filled with people getting better at things. Her characters were often wrong, and could be cutting, but the successful ones improved their understanding of themselves and others and corrected their behavior in turn. In a time of many more constraints on what could and could not be said, they managed to express and receive love, often with crystalline stylistic perfection. Surely a celestial entity designed to communicate divine love could, given a timeframe of eternity, manage a few improvements in articulating a more earthly variety.

Though it would be easier if the Designer answered Her helpline.

*

To understand what led this restless and fretful Principality to prostrate himself before a deity he was in a bit of a spat with, one must first understand how this particular ethereal being had come to acquire the Hobnobs of Unspeakable Poignancy.

“I know you don’t always sleep,” Crowley had said, after they’d arrived at his flat, drunk a toast to themselves, and hashed out a plan to outwit the Afterlives with bodyswaps and frozen desserts. “But I’m going to give it a try. Come on, I want you to see—in case our calculations are off and anyone shows up here. If you can get to me quickly, we could still pull it off.”

Aziraphale had trailed down the hall behind Crowley, trying very hard not to think about where he was going. The thought of Crowley’s bedroom had occurred to him before and had been known to elicit a complicated range of feelings, none of which were likely to enhance clarity. He’d spent a great deal of time and energy denying some of these feelings, after all, and was not sure entirely sure how far others of them might actually go, given the freedom to do so. Some of them were even painful. And all of them could get bossy.

This consternation had Aziraphale stopping in the hallway to examine some décor for a fairly extensive period of time, given that he had no idea what he was looking at. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, trying to recall some strategy for calming oneself but being too nervous to do so.

Crowley poked his head around the door. “Angel, just as soon as you’re done getting the lay of that particular bit of wall—”

“Oh—it’s a, very nice piece.”

“I paid a pretty price for that blank wall, I can tell you. It’s an original. But could you take your time studying its nuances after I’ve got to bed?”

“Right. Sorry, I’m just, yes.” Aziraphale made it to the doorway, where he hovered hesitantly, or hesitated hoveringly, or something equally ineffectual and awkward.

Crowley was doing his best to give a tour of an entirely empty room. Almost entirely. That Aziraphale was avoiding looking at the only exception to this emptiness besides the demon himself did not help—well, anything at all.

“I only ever sleep in here,” Crowley was saying, waving his hands at various pockets of unoccupied floor and ceiling space, “so there’s not much beside the bed—on the other hand, there’s a lot of that.” Crowley gestured toward it with one of his absurdly long arms, now covered in what looked like a black long sleeved T-shirt. He’d also managed to get out of his trousers—that had to be by miracle—and swapped them for some slightly looser-fitting black things that were probably too cool to be called pajamas but nonetheless looked surprisingly soft and comfortable.

Crowley looked soft, overall. Touchable. Aziraphale wanted to be closer to him, to breath in some of that surprising softness, much as he had done on the coach ride here. But it was different to do that sort of thing in…in a room that contained a demon and…

An enormous bed covered in black silk with red satin pillows and cushions that looked like it was made for hosting a great deal of company.

Aziraphale was aware that Crowley was still talking, but the bed was very loud and it took a great deal of effort to not stare at it.

“Oi. Angel. Over here.”

Aziraphale squared his shoulders and looked at Crowley. Who was now facing him, still talking. Whose eyes were open and unhidden. Who was wearing a T-shirt with a little cartoon angel on it over the inscription “on the streets,” and an adorable devil cavorting over the words “in the sheets.”

It was extremely silly, slightly disturbing, and not even a little bit cool. It was _adorable._

“I—” Aziraphale began. “This sartorial tribute is unexpected but I am no less honored by it. However did you find such likenesses done in simple casual wear?”

“There you are, Angel. Back from your fugue state, then? Ready to face the many temptations of my demonic lair of ill repute?” He picked up a cushion and brandished it at Aziraphale. “Well stocked with instruments of torture?”

“Erm.” Aziraphale shifted on his feet some more.

“Angel,” drawled the demon in his demonic lair, “relax. I don’t bring work home. I’m the only entity, supernatural or otherwise, that has even set foot in here. You won’t be—compromised. I _promise._ There’s a special lock on the door, is all, and so if you find yourself getting sleepy or distracted—”

“It isn’t that,” Aziraphale said, realizing suddenly that it was true. “Or—thank you, it isn’t mostly that. I’m aware I’m being perfectly ridiculous. We’ve just agreed I’m going to inhabit your body, it could hardly even be called a warm-up to enter your bedroom.”

He sighed. “It’s only—people do all kinds of different things in bedrooms. Humans often spend a third of their lives in them, but I don’t. I don’t have much to do with sleep, mine or anyone else’s. And what humans get up to—between the sheets, as your charming outfit puts it—when they aren’t sleeping, well, some of it’s your lot’s purview, and as for the rest of it, Heaven’s always been a bit tense about the whole enterprise. And except for the one time, people tend to not need much divine intervention to get to propagating, which was Gabriel’s prime directive. Pleasure takes care of itself, by and large, and if it’s for love—why, that’s already blessed, direct from God, bypasses the angels and other heavenly apparatus entirely. So I—haven’t had much cause, I suppose. To spend a great deal of time in bedrooms.”

“Oh. Right. Well, you’re missing out.”

“Not entirely.” Aziraphale hesitated, then continued. “I used to pop in more regularly for things like births, but often if I had a call to be there, it was because someone was—was on their way out, rather directly. Mother, or child. Or both, especially before people came up with handwashing. But now people more often go to hospital for lying in, or at least think to disinfect things, and so recently, the only times I’ve been in anyone’s bedroom has been when they’re—”

“Dying,” finished Crowley. “Oh, angel.” Crowley looked at him with his open, kind yellow eyes in silence, then shook his head. “If it’s any comfort, I’ve been doing my best not to die for days now, and I hope only to improve on my record this evening.”

“It is,” said Aziraphale, as directly as he possibly could, “a very great comfort.”

Crowley ducked the potentially kind words with a kind of balletic intensity and strode off to the other side of the room.

“Happy to be of service,” said Crowley to his closet door. “Immortality also helps, but not as much as you might think, the past few days—oh! Comfort! I’m an idiot! I’d almost forgot.” He dove into the closet and emerged brandishing an overnight bag. “Here. I’ve had one of these around for you for ages, in case we needed to—get out of Dodge and had to lay low, couldn’t miracle supplies.”

“In case we got caught, you mean. Together,” Aziraphale said. His thoughts seemed to be moving remarkably slowly. “You had an—escape plan?”

“When we were working together, yeah. Escape plan’s a devious kind of thing, a bit wily, so stands to reason it would fall to me to sort out, per our Arrangement. Came with my side of the territory, I thought. Anyway, you’ll find—something else to put on, and some tea and sugar and some of those little milk packets, Hobnobs for if you get peckish, Jane bloody Austen.” Crowley looked up with an almost shy smile. “Spare bowtie, even.”

Aziraphale stared. His eyes were a little damp.

Cowley set the bag on the bed and patted the duvet beside it. “Sit here a minute, angel. Then go and make your tea, and have a read, or whatever else you like to do at night, except maybe leave off the fretting and pacing.”

Aziraphale shuffled across the room and sat on the corner of the bed by the overnight bag. He couldn’t speak. Everything he might possibly say was stifled by his own echoes.

_Listen to yourself,_ he’d said. _I don’t even like you,_ he’d said.

Crowley stretched himself out on one side of the vast expanse of duvet. There might just as well have been miles between him and Aziraphale. “Look at me just a moment, won’t you, angel? You keep going a bit missing in action, and this is important.”

“You’re taking care of me,” said Aziraphale, quietly.

“Well, someone has to,” muttered Crowley, and he sounded angry.

“Not really. I may have been off my game recently, but—”

“Angel—not what I meant. I suppose I’m,” Crowley paused, “ _miffed_ at your—” he waved his hand vaguely upwards, “former colleagues, but I meant more that you’ve lost your _bloody home_ and everything you cared about most—"

“Never mind,” said Aziraphale, wistfully. Best not to think about the bookshop. “It wasn’t the end of the world.”

_I didn’t lose what I care for most in the world, I’m looking at it,_ he didn’t say. Why didn’t he say it? His mouth worked. He’d managed to say much worse things not so very long ago.

He turned, tucking one leg under himself, and scooted forward on the bed so he could reach out to pat Crowley’s black clad ankle. “I’ve recently gotten the good news I still have Hobnobs, after all.”

Crowley was very still. “You’re fond of them,” he said, sounding somewhat strained.

“Very much so,” Aziraphale said. He gave Crowley’s leg another pat, registering the soft material and warmth, carefully not registering anything more threatening to his equanimity. He took the bag—classic rich brown leather with loop handles and a shoulder strap. “It’s very nice, the bag—suits me—well, and suits my suits.” He looked up again at Crowley, who had propped himself up against the cushions and was watching Aziraphale with an uncharacteristically open smile.

“Glad I got that right,” he said, teasing, “when we’ve only just met.”

“They say ‘Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above,’ but that’s rubbish,” said Aziraphale, running his hands over the seams and fittings. “This one obviously comes from Italy.”

“Not a proper gift,” grumbled Crowley. “Just disaster preparedness. And the Hobnobs are from Tesco.”

“So I shouldn’t say thank you?”

“Nah.”

“Then perhaps I’ll go and make myself some tea and have a biscuit. Perhaps have them on the balcony.” Aziraphale opened the bag, looked inside, and actually squealed in delight. “Oh, Crowley. There’s plain _and_ chocolate. And what cozy tartan pjs.”

“I know what you like, angel.” And then Crowley went quiet and still, looking down. “Mostly,” he whispered.

“You _do_ ,” said Aziraphale. “Sometimes better than I do. Obviously.” He paused, mouth working again, choking past echoes of his own stupidity. “Crowley, about—"

“About the room, and the lock,” Crowley interrupted hastily. “Potter about with your tea, of course, make yourself quite at home. Please. But if you do find yourself wanting a bit of a lie down, come in here. Bed’s the size of South America, roughly—there’s plenty of room. I’ll be out like a light, and you can lock the door. It’s a—one of those safe rooms, with enhancements. If anyone or anything gets past the front door, they’ll trip the alarm, and it’ll take them a minute to get past this one, whatever they use on it. We’ll still have time to suit up, so to speak. And if you’re awake out front, you’ll hear them in time to get yourself down here, lock the door, and wake me. In that order. It’s a dial, just turn it past six.”

“More disaster preparedness?”

“Nap preparedness. Can’t be too careful. Don’t know as I’ve mentioned it, but demons aren’t so fussed about maintaining personal boundaries when you get on their bad side.” Crowley made a sound that might have been a laugh. “And we don’t have a good side, so—pays to think ahead.”

“My dear, I’m too tired to be thrown up against a wall just now, so I’m not going to argue the point. But when this is all over, you and I are going to have a conversation.”

“Course we are. ‘Ss what we do,” said Crowley, his sibilants growing long and drowsy. “’Sss the whole point,” he said, burrowing his way into a pile of pillows.

_I could lie down next to him,_ thought Aziraphale as he shifted on the bed. _There’s no one to say anything about it. Go on, you’ll be inside him soon enough…_

Oh.

_That is not what I meant at all_.

He didn’t think it was. Maybe a little? But how would he know? And if he tried, and it wasn’t?

This was not his first go round with these thoughts, and it wasn’t likely to be his last.

It occurred to Aziraphale that if he was going to engage in this kind of heavy fretting, he’d better do it alone and in the relative privacy of the balcony. He’d try not to pace.

Aziraphale was not at his best when thinking about sex, but to be fair, it was difficult to think in a foreign language, even if one had considered taking it up from time to time. But Aziraphale had never gotten farther than a sort of tourist’s phrasebook, and as it happened, he’d never actually taken so much as a dirty weekend journey.

In point of fact, Aziraphale had spent far more time over the years engaged in not thinking about making any such Effort, than he had in imagining what he might actually like to do if he ever had the opportunity. The stern and rigorous practice of denying whole swaths of feelings and behavior towards his dearest friend had often enough outpaced the energy he put into activities that might have done much more good and certainly, he had now to admit, less harm.

Aziraphale couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been delighted to see Crowley, and he couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t worried about letting it go too far. It wasn’t only a matter of the potential for lust—gluttony, covetousness, even envy, all could be stirred by thoughts of the demon, he’d realized almost immediately. Of course, so could more virtuous impulses such as charity, hope, and (much more rarely) courage, but Aziraphale couldn’t even be certain that these retained their virtue if inspired by and directed toward the Fallen.

It had always seemed clear that Aziraphale needed to keep an eye on himself on any number of fronts. He’d been afraid of being caught—and with good reason, as his still-bruised midsection could attest. But it was more than that.

Now, these rigorous practices were ingrained. They’d formed their own troughs and dams in his psyche, steering thoughts and feelings down one incline and not another, pooling in this reservoir and not that one. When a dam burst—as it had one evening outside a bombed-out church—love and light overflowed the whole landscape, overwhelming everything, but not without darker currents. So Aziraphale still fought to keep it all in channels, and certainly behind the levees that kept it from breaking forth where it could be spoken.

Unfortunately, this had worked a little too well, and led to some less desirable consequences.

For example.

“I lost my best friend,” someone might say.

“No, you haven’t. You couldn’t. I was being a git, but I’m right here, and I’m not going anywhere,” any moderately human entity would respond.

An ethereal being of divine love, though, might struggle to give an answer appropriate to the emotional toll of a late coach from Hull or a misdirected parcel and finish by sending the grieving party to run a personal errand.

Aziraphale could no longer deny that his system of containment, which he’d imagined had been limited in impact to his own estate, had had broader environmental consequences, done damage to Crowley’s own ecosystem—and yet there he was, a soft thing inhabiting blunt walls and sharp angles, cultivating his garden with love and care disguised as rejection, the only model he’d ever known.

_So. Before we go jumping into bed together..._

_Wouldn’t want to rush things, would we?_ But that wasn’t it, exactly. The Principality of Apparently Eternal Hesitation had been known to run out of patience with himself, but in this case, he had to concede that he had a point. Whatever experiments he might (or might not) enjoy in the future, for the time being, he’d best direct any efforts he could muster at some...much-needed structural renovations to the territories he already had under management—

_For mine metaphors are gone over mine head: as an heavy burden they are too heavy for me…_

“What I mean is,” said Aziraphale, low and under his breath, “that if both of us survive the day tomorrow, I will fucking sort myself out.”

_So help me, God._

Thus the Angel of Ponderous Metaphor ended up on his knees on Crowley’s balcony—alone, except for the spider plant who might have gotten the wrong idea from the posture—asking for Guidance. This gesture in itself was not surprising, given the longevity of old habits. More surprising—shocking, really—was that Guidance, while far from the kind a bibliophile angel had anticipated or preferred, seemed to have been offered.

*

God moves in strange and wondrous and sometimes distinctly bitchy ways, as was revealed after an angel and a demon had flummoxed the combined forces of Heaven and Hell but before they’d gone on to enjoy a nearly eternal lunch.

When Aziraphale and Crowley had parted briefly to see to their newly restored material possessions, the angel had come across bookshop additions of a kind he was less inclined to share over brandy and dessert.

In the midst of welcoming back to his shelves new friends and old, the Principality of a Resurrected First Octavo Format King James Bible made the unwelcome discovery of a far more visibly positioned and plentiful self-help section than he’d ever have tolerated of his own volition.

Aziraphale _loathed_ the entire genre. Such books were not his cup of tea, not remotely his way of inhabiting and enjoying language. A few choice titles were even front-facing, pushy and brazen. “’Love Languages.’” _Ugh. Simpleminded twaddle._ “‘Why Don’t You Apologize?’ I don’t know, but I expect you’ve got a theory. What’s next, ‘Angels are from Mars, Demons are from Venus?’” Aziraphale addressed himself to the interlopers, but he scorned and dreaded their answers in equal parts.

_Egregiously_ straightforward, the lot of them. Written without artistry or nuance. “God and other artists are always a little obscure,” poor Oscar had been fond of saying, and on the basis of Aziraphale’s own dealings with Her, not to mention Abstract Expressionism, he could only agree.

Eleven year-old boys, on the other hand, were not generally known for their great subtlety. And it must be acknowledged Oscar’s dedication to his stylistic principles, however admirable, had not saved him. Far from it, in fact.

With great distaste, Aziraphale plucked a volume off the shelf, began leafing through it, grimacing. But he paused when he came across the old chestnut about how insanity could be defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

_So could inanity, for that matter,_ he groused. But he had to allow that the twaddle had a point.

If the Angel of Bibliophilic Discernment wanted to do better by his personal demon, and he _absolutely did,_ then perhaps he’d be best off not following aesthetic dictates informed by habit. “As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly,” as an older specimen of the genre in question might put it, somewhat more evocatively.

_Proverbs, though._ _Always so_ preachy.

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding,” Aziraphale muttered under his breath. And through his teeth. “Lord,” he repeated, and he meant it to sting.

That was all very well, but Aziraphale wasn’t going to be trusting Her with his whole heart, not after the week he’d had. That was a bit bloody much. The only being who’d remotely earned that honor was the demon She’d cast out for what couldn’t possibly have been any good reason.

But, perhaps even deities— _of whom there is only One, just a figure of speech, don’t get all testy,_ he prayed hastily, in case anyone was still listening—make mistakes. After all, Aziraphale’s own recent errors in judgment (as it happened, the very same error of judgment vis-à-vis the very same demon) gave him little enough cause to feel superior to so much as a dung beetle.

In the end, since he’d requested and She’d apparently bothered to issue an answer in some kind of semi-holy cooperation with the erstwhile Destroyer of Worlds, Aziraphale conceded that at the very least he should be willing to consider Her advice. “The deity’s, that is, not the vermin’s,” he clarified helpfully to his library at large. He was hoping for change—but not a full-on Metamorphosis.

Gritting his teeth, Aziraphale gathered a small pile of _suggested reading,_ grabbed several nineteenth-century etiquette volumes as a kind of ballast, and locked himself in his back room. He took notes—in Adamic, as was no doubt appropriate. Besides, while he must have spoken it well enough to chat with Eve, no wandering serpent who might stumble across Aziraphale’s notebook was likely to know the language in its written form (which only existed because Heaven was teeming with prescriptive grammarians).

The recourse to a language last used in the Garden of Eden might seem excessive. But it was excruciating enough to be consulting these rather more recent books without being mocked for it mercilessly. Even the most trustworthy demons were _demons,_ after all, and much inclined to mocking silly angels, even if they were never vicious in the way that, say, angels could be themselves.

One real difficulty, it soon emerged, that an angel was likely to face in this undertaking of Failing Ever So Slightly Less at Deserving a Demon (slogans were not going to be his strong suit, but that was a point of pride) was the following: according to everything he’d been reading (if you could call it that), improved communication involved being honest about one’s feelings, which entailed in all likelihood at least knowing what they were, even understanding them. And that, as seen, was something Aziraphale was spectacularly bad at.

However. No one improved by giving up, and Grace was sometimes a state more stumbled into than found.

*

Very late the night before, ( _When night is almost done,_ ) not so long before dawn, ( _And sunrise grows so near_ ) Aziraphale had left Austen’s Emma to her unflagging confidence in her own flawed judgment. He’d been drowsing, lines of some half-forgotten poem running through his head but veering off the moment he tried to catch hold of them in memory. Sleep was tugging at him more than usual ( _And sunrise grows so near_ ), and he would do as Crowley had asked.

Aziraphale took the tartan pajamas from his new overnight bag and stepped into the hallway to change the slow, human way. The flannel was soft on his skin and he allowed himself to consider that Crowley had chosen it for that purpose, had likely touched it, thinking how soft it would feel. ( _so near_ _That we can touch the spaces…)_

He allowed himself to consider this thought pleasant.

He did not allow himself to look at Crowley in the bed as he approached it, or as he pulled back and then replaced the duvet, or as he lay down on top of it. He allowed himself to look down along his own body and note how the green tartan diffused the stark yet suggestive argument black silk bedlinens made so loudly, rendering them more hospitable to a hesitant if curious angel of yet to be determined tastes. If any. 

He hardly allowed himself to think of Crowley in this bed next to him, fast asleep and motionless. ( _…so near That we can touch…)_

He did not allow himself to think of Crowley in any other bed with anyone else.

He allowed himself to remember that who Crowley went to bed with and what they did there was none of an angel’s business ( _old faded midnight…)_ , but allowing did nothing whatsoever to convince something newly stubborn in Aziraphale to acknowledge any such thing. Nor did encouragement, nor even a stern talking to. ( _That frightened but an hour…_ )

In the end, only the threat that a disobedient angel would be forced to take himself out of this bed and go back to the sole companionship of Miss Woodhouse and an armchair was enough to make him acknowledge this stubborn truth.

Although Aziraphale did not allow himself to turn on his side and look at Crowley, soft and still and sleeping in the same bed in which he himself lay, he did turn, and did look, and was all but overcome by what he saw ( _so near_ ). Crowley’s face glowed pale against black silk, its angles soothed by sleep and delicately warmed by reflected red satin. His hair spiked and fell unruly, cast shadows on his brow and all but demanded that any nearby hand reach out to brush it back. (… _so near_ _That we can touch_ )

Aziraphale’s hands stayed by his own sides, but he acknowledged the distinctly unallowed, indeed historically forbidden but nonetheless familiar rush and flush of feeling, longing, aching for closeness, a powerful but gentle fluttering in the area of his heart and even in his belly. 

Not lower, no, not remarkably so, not more there than any other place on his body ( _touch the spaces_ ) swathed in Crowley-chosen flannel and delighted enough to be so.

It might not require much of an Effort, more of a letting go, to allow it to flow in that direction. But as things were, that direction didn’t command more of an abject yearning than any other aspect of the age-old, tamped down, self-thwarted desire to be _closer_ to Crowley, to share _more_ with Crowley, whether food or wine or a single seat on an otherwise empty Oxford coach. Or a sprawling bed. Or, in a very different way, the very body that lay next to him there. (… _so near_ _That we can touch_ )

Which was just as well. Because Crowley had been quite clear about what the bed was for, quite clear about what kind of invitation he was extending and what kind he wasn’t. Some part of that clarity had been to put a panicking angel at his ease ( _frightened but an hour_ ), but that hardly meant it didn’t align with the demon’s own preferences and desires ( _For that old faded midnight…_ ) _._

Perhaps resistance had been easy because nothing of the kind was on offer to the angel.

Aziraphale’s thoughts grew sharper, the reverie fading.

Crowley had never turned the obviously seductive potential of his professional wiles on Aziraphale in any concerted way, not beyond the barbs and jokes they habitually exchanged that spoke to familiarity and amused affection rather than actual tension. 

In six thousand years, they’d never so much as touched on that aspect of the demon’s temptation work, and he’d certainly never suggested Aziraphale take on any such duties in the course of their Arrangement. Aziraphale had put this down to the considerateness that had always characterized his Infernal Enemy’s conduct, but it could just has well have been the less flattering but no doubt equally obvious conclusion that Aziraphale wouldn’t be up to the task.

While this was not an area in which the angel’s considerable strengths of insight and perception lay, he was more than aware that in this day and age, bodies like the one on the other side of the bed had many more options, when pursuing carnal pleasures, than bodies that resembled Aziraphale’s own human form. The T-shirt Crowley had chosen to sleep in perhaps reinforced the point that angels and demons were properly separated in this regard…

Why did this thought create such a tightening of anxiety when Aziraphale was by no means certain that such pleasures were of primary interest to him in any case?

_Would it have been worthwhile…_

If his own subconscious _would_ kindly refrain from channeling J. Alfred bloody Prufrock every time he tried to determine what he, Aziraphale, might want!

What did it _take?_ There was nothing to stop him from reaching out and brushing the hair off his friend’s brow, if that was what he wanted. It wasn’t a hardcore come-on, hardly proscribed by Crowley’s sleep-only insistence.

_And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!/ Smoothed by long fingers…_ it seems no one writes about the stockier, fleshier digits, probably for good reason.

“Aziraphale?” slurred the not-so-peacefully-sleeping-after-all demon, staring but not quite seeing, “are you here?”

Echoes all around, then. “Right here, yes. Sorry to disturb you.”

“No, ‘m glad. Thought you were gone,” Crowley sighed, sounding desperately sad.

This was not complicated. Aziraphale inched closer. Some decisions were better off left somewhere other than with his mind.

“I'm right here—bit awkward about it, I’m afraid. I haven’t exactly done this before.” He allowed his hand to reach out and smooth the hair from Crowley’s brow and it was every bit the intimacy he’d imagined.

“Wherever you are, I’ll come to you,” murmured Crowley, leaning into Aziraphale’s hand and drifting back to sleep.

“I’ll let you,” whispered Aziraphale, many, many minutes later.

*

Aziraphale remained uncertain of many things, where things were feelings and their competent expression. But some things, at least, were growing clearer.

One, T. S. Eliot was a pillock who could learn to mind his own posthumous business.

Two, Guilt and shame were almost universally excoriated by the Prophets of the New Emotional Intelligence as being Not Helpful in achieving his goals of apology, amends, and improved communication, so he could swear off them a bit.

Three, Some of these _skills_ he was trying to acquire obviously had to be translated into a language that might not be recognizable as a Love Language to the world at large but at least would be comprehensible to those conversant in six thousand years of Aziraphale and Crowley. If the demon had wanted a walking self-improvement library, there were certainly better bets than the angel he seemed to prefer.

Four, Several sources stressed the importance of self-care, an area in which Aziraphale felt he might naturally excel, and to that end, he had already invested in several new fragrances of bubble bath and an assortment of fine chocolates.

Five (and this one quietly), Touch might be thought of as a language. And it was a language, infinitely to his own surprise, in which the angel seemed to possess some native ability. If he let it, it came to him, more like forgetting he didn’t know something than learning it for the first time. Self-consciousness made him stutter, certain dialects might forever remain foreign, and he was more conversant in low-light settings. But Aziraphale thought that, with practice, he might gain a kind of fluency, world enough and time having been apparently granted.


	2. the nerves in patterns on a screen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I—no, that isn’t what I meant at all.” Aziraphale burst into his reverie, having no idea, of course, of Crowley’s internal Highlands jaunt. “I meant—do let me keep you, Crowley.”
> 
> Without the support of a fairly substantial critique of the Roman conquest, Crowley would no doubt have fallen right over, got stuck in Ancient History, and never have even made it to hear that sentence, let alone examine it later and refashion it into something he might keep in a locket around his neck.
> 
> The more immediate result of this slow transition between worlds and times was, of course, that he remained quite silent in the time he was actually occupying.
> 
> “Er, keep you here a little longer, I mean, of course,” added Aziraphale, “I have a bit of work to finish up, but perhaps you would be so kind as to sit with me, and then we could—oh, don’t lean into Tacitus, dear, I do so much prefer you just a tad more loquacious.”

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:  
Would it have been worth while  
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,  
And turning toward the window, should say:  
“That is not it at all  
That is not what I meant, at all."

The angel was sitting on a sofa that looked miraculously identical to its predecessor, leaning forward over several open books and a sheaf of papers. His brow was furrowed in concentration as he tapped his lips rhythmically with the end of his pen. All around him were stacks of books—as per usual—but some were piled high enough that they blocked the shop entrance from view.

Aziraphale was so deep in thought that when Crowley strode in, the angel didn’t immediately look up or even answer an initial greeting. And Crowley, because of the extra-high piles of extra-old books, couldn’t see him.

The late morning sun filtered in through the windows, catching slow-floating dust motes and illuminating them like…tiny embers, still aglow on their way to ash. If you looked at them from the right angle through a prism of anxiety and stale liquor.

“Aziraphale!” Crowley repeated, trying not to panic, or at least not sound as if he was panicking, and failing at both.

“Oh!” Aziraphale stood up like a Jack-in-the-Box, scattering a few papers and even a book that he, remarkably, allowed to fall unnoticed. “Crowley! How lovely! I hadn’t looked forward to seeing you until later!” 

Crowley actually staggered back a step in some mixture of surprise at the sudden movement, relief at Aziraphale’s actual presence, and the angel’s look and tone, which suggested that the earth could furnish no greater delight than a demon panicking in a bookshop.

The demon in question was also some combination of ever so slightly drunk and ever so slightly hung-over, having earlier decided that some vestige of each was only what he deserved. “Uhn,” he breathed. “There you are.”

“Do come in, come look at—” the angel stopped and looked at Crowley’s face. “Are you all right? What’s the matter?” Aziraphale moved towards him, open and concerned. Then he winced. “Oh, of course, I’m an idiot. I wasn’t expecting you so soon—but that’s quite all right, I mean to say, it’s better—I only meant, I’d have thought to not be so preoccupied.”

Aziraphale took in Crowley’s rumpled clothes, tired eyes, and paler than usual skin. He even looked to be trembling. “Oh dear, we’d even talked about it before you left last night. And here I’m trying to be less thoughtless.”

Crowley frowned at that. “Less—? What are you on about?”

Aziraphale shook his head, looking properly vexed. He reached out, took Crowley’s cold hands in his, squeezed gently, and led him to the sofa. “Look, see, still corporeal as anything—but I’m not completely certain about you.” Aziaphale looked him over again. “Do sit down before you fall over. Did something happen?”

Crowley sank into the sofa and put his head back, closing his eyes. That was a lot of angel, all at once, fluttering as much as if he’d had his wings out. It was a nice flutter, glad to see him, solicitous. Almost unbearably kind. But the flutter it produced in return in Crowley’s chest and stomach was enough to knock an already unsteady demon right off his feet.

Handy things, then, sofas.

“ _I_ happened.” He sighed, rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Didn’t go home. Didn’t sleep. Stayed up drinking in a bar around the corner. Then went for kebab.”

“Oh.” The angel deflated a little. “But you were so tired. I thought—why didn’t you come—” He stopped. “How should I presume—oh _bother_ that.” He looked down, and it was as if some portion of light had gone out of the room. “Of course I understand an antiquarian bookshop is not the very zenith of Soho nightlife. But you needn’t—”

He looked up at Crowley, who was now staring back with the concentration of one trying to follow a conversation in a foreign language. While ever so slightly drunk, but not quite drunk enough for it to help. “You could just say, then, dear, the next time. I didn’t mean to—cramp your style.”

“No.” It wasn’t much, but it sounded dead certain.

“Beg your pardon?” Now it was the angel’s turn be confused. A little crumpled. It might be the very last thing a demon could bear.

“That is not it at all. I meant to go home, and I was tired, and you had your bookshop to see to. You know you wanted to be about the books—look at you.” He gestured around at the books, the papers, the ink on the angel’s soft, capable hands. “You’re a cat in catnip. Practically rolling in all this. Papery. Catnip. I was just—”

Crowley got up, swayed slightly, righted himself and paced over to the door. He looked up and down the shelves and circle staircase and ceiling. _Didn’t want to be alone. Didn’t want to go home. Didn’t want to be a burden. Didn’t want to go too fast._

“Antsy.” He addressed himself to what looked to be Ancient History. Not an area he generally needed much tutelage in, but it was infinitely preferable to looking at an infinitely kind angel he’d just somehow crumpled.

Under ordinary circumstances, he might be demonic enough to enjoy even the possibility that Aziraphale was in some way jealous of Crowley’s time and attention, but there wasn’t a prize in the universe worth the angel crestfallen when Crowley had caused it rather than being the one to pick up whatever crest it was, dust it off, and restore it to its rightful position.

“Well. Don’t let me keep you—” the angel began testily, and Crowley felt as if he might shrink right into the Ancient History section, where after all, extra old things no doubt belonged.

Behind him, Crowley heard a sigh, a rustle of paper, as of pages turning, and he wondered if he’d been dismissed, and Aziraphale was simply going back to whatever work he’d been doing. 

Crowley rested his head on a volume of Tacitus and remembered how cold it had been when the man’s father-in-law got to northern Scotland, when he’d insisted on seeing the Highlands as an irresistible temptation and nothing Crowley could say could convince him that he hadn’t meant to suggest that in the slightest.

How Crowley had given that impression, he had no idea—he was hardly a fan of damp cold, and whiskey hadn’t even been invented yet. But then, so many of his idle comments seemed to incur collateral damage. Agricola had ended up dismissing him with as little warning as Aziraphale just had, and it hadn’t worked out so well for the Caledonians.

10,000 war dead. Crumpled angels. Crowley’s collateral damage ran the gamut.

Crowley leaned in a little further to Tacitus, gearing up to make for the doorway.

“I—no, that isn’t what _I_ meant at all.” Aziraphale burst into his reverie, having no idea, of course, of Crowley’s internal Highlands jaunt. “I meant— _do_ let me keep you, Crowley.”

Without the support of a fairly substantial critique of the Roman conquest, Crowley would no doubt have fallen right over, got stuck in Ancient History, and never have even made it to hear that sentence, let alone examine it later and refashion it into something he might keep in a locket around his neck.

The more immediate result of this slow transition between worlds and times was, of course, that he remained quite silent in the time he was actually occupying.

“Er, keep you here a little longer, I mean, of course,” added Aziraphale, “I have a bit of work to finish up, but perhaps you would be so kind as to sit with me, and then we could—oh, don’t lean into Tacitus, dear, I do so much prefer you just a tad more loquacious.”

The angel’s voice was vibrating with anxiety, and it struck Crowley like a slap in the face that he himself was being rude and even a little unkind. Couldn’t have it. Absolutely not.

Turning, Crowley sobered himself at last and swanned as best he could across the shop. “Be careful what you wish for, angel, you know that. I’ll be as loquacious as a chattering nun in no time. And keep me? Could get pricey.”

He smiled, slow and genuine, at the angel’s open, slightly pleading eyes and twisting, ink-stained hands. Everything here was _fine, lovely, what he longed for,_ if he could just lean into it instead of into Roman bloody history. “Sounds tempting, though. You’re getting good. Are we going for a full on job swap, then, now we’re settled into our own bodies?”

He threw himself back on the sofa and stretched his legs, regretting he could cure drunkenness much more thoroughly than he could a hangover. Or, apparently, whatever demonic style of PTSD he seemed to be sporting this season.

Aziraphale’s smile lit up his face only a bit less brightly than before. “Could do, I think I could get rather fond of tempting. But how will you manage the other end? I know better than to accuse you of any good works. Especially after you’ve been out at the bars all night.”

The last part had the distinct sound of someone trying extremely hard to be casual about something they did not feel casual about in the least, but Crowley was too hungover to catch it.

“You’d be surprised, angel. I was all about thwarting. I thwarted so many carnal desires, you’ve absolutely no idea. If even one person in that bar got off at any time last night, I’d be shocked. Even turned an Errant Youth away from selling themselves and bought them a kebab instead.” 

Crowley’s eyes were closed, his voice growing slow and gravel-tinged. “Best get down to it with your wiles, I’ve got this line of work ssorted.”

“So glad to hear it,” said Aziraphale, entirely honest. He picked up a book. “If you don’t mind waiting for me there a bit, I’ll see what I can do to tempt you to eat something very unhealthy later on.”

“If you’re keeping me, does it sstill count as temptation?” Crowley squirmed and stretched, trying to settle in.

“I should hope so—I wouldn’t want you to stay just for the meals and long edifying conversations about errata and deckled edges,” Aziraphale was beginning to drift into a volume featuring those very elements, and a soft silence settled down around the bookshop, which was quite suddenly closed.

Crowley stretched again. Without looking up, Aziraphale clucked. “A hellfiend who knew what was good for him might take his boots off and stretch out a little. Possibly as part of keeping you, I’ve arranged for a couple of feet of extra sofa space.”

“Don’t expect you’ll find such a creature,” muttered Crowley, but Aziraphale heard the telltale sounds of first one boot, then another dropping to the floor, then the rustling of legs and torso and arms and eventually even feet arranging themselves into a more sustainable sprawl.

“Mmmmm. ‘f we knew what was good for us, unlikely we’d be hellfiends. As it is, we’ll be the ones at the end of the bar drinking alone ‘stead of cozy on a fucking heavenly sofa, what the _hell_ did you do to it, this is ssso comfortable.”

“Wiles, dear,” said Aziraphale, reaching out to Crowley’s sock-covered ankles and tugging them a little closer. “Wiles and soft cushion torture, I pay attention.” He let his hand rest on Crowley’s bony ankle, fingers curling around with something more than a little suggestive of possession.

“Perfect angel,” drawled Crowley, in a tone that left it entirely uncertain whether it meant to be gently ironic or if a comma was lurking there, whispering earnestness. Crowley was asleep before Aziraphale thought to ask, and he reflected that either would do very nicely indeed.

*

Crowley was deep asleep. One foot had tucked its toes under the edge of Aziraphale’s thigh, and Aziraphale was delighted. It was so intimate, it made his insides go all liquidy and light. He blushed as he recalled blurting out that he wanted to keep Crowley, but it was absolutely true, he’d keep him right here on this sofa for days if he could.

He snapped into existence a soft, thick chenille throw over the demon’s sleeping body, tucked it around his feet and, on second thought, turned its color from a rich gold to a red that recalled the satin pillows Aziraphale remembered from Crowley’s bed, the ones they’d lain against as he’d soothed the demon and petted his hair and helped him sleep.

Aziraphale didn’t know if Crowley remembered, if he’d been awake enough to, and he wouldn’t ask. But the decadent, delicious memory of it warmed the angel in heady waves he felt in the tips of his fingers and tongue and even down the tops of his legs.

Whether this was lust, exactly, Aziraphale wasn’t certain, but it was fantastic and unmatchable and he wanted to have it: Crowley vulnerable, trusting, warmed by the angel’s own heat, soothed by him, beautiful to look at, soft to the touch, _his,_ Aziraphale’s, his absolute own.

A good part of figuring out one’s feelings, as it turned out, was allowing oneself to have them.

Aziraphale was a bit surprised that he’d needed to be reading awful paperbacks to figure this out, given that entire novels had been devoted to this very idea and it wasn’t as if Aziraphale was new to reading. However, there he was, and scolding himself for his own ridiculous inadequacies was a frightfully addictive hobby but one he’d been trying to cut back on.

Still. It was all very well and good to acknowledge _nice_ feelings, at least it was after the eternal wrath of heaven and hell was factored out of the equation. It wasn’t exactly daring or…edgy, did they say now?...to acknowledge that you loved your dearest friend. Aziraphale had actually managed to do that even with the eternal wrath threat fully in place.

It really oughtn’t to be that challenging—what kind of an entity didn’t love their friends? Denied they did? Denied _liking_ them?

That was a spiral path of apparently endless extension, but one Aziraphale chose not to follow at the moment, instead tucking the throw more snugly in around Crowley’s feet and reaching for his notebook from the table.

As he’d done the night before, the angel made notes about the feelings he’d allowed and identified, where he’d succeeded in focusing and acting on them, where he’d stumbled, and where he’d experienced or apparently caused comfort, affection, or pain.

It was a _lot_ of work _._ How did people ever get anything else done?

Aziraphale was also uncertain what one did about feelings that were more controversial, feelings that one didn’t want to have because they were—ugly, frankly.

Wasn’t it _better_ to deny those? Wasn’t it better to _act as if_ in those cases? He was sure he’d seen something about _acting as if_ as a positive thing. He made a note to look into that further, shuddering slightly at the aesthetics of it, but making the note nonetheless.

Surely it was best to _act as if_ he did not want personally to dismember anyone who might have been touching Crowley, or thinking about touching Crowley, or possibly even looking at Crowley, while Crowley had preferred to be in a bar filled with such people, rather than with Aziraphale? That was Crowley’s right, that was those other people’s right, Aziraphale was absolutely, passionately convinced of those rights and would defend them from…awful, possessive, controlling, petty, jealous, unreasonable entities.

Aziraphale was reasonably confident in his self-restraint where it came to actual violence—he covered spiders he found in the shop with little cups and put them out the back windows, and simply altered the ambitions of the various criminals who’d tried to threaten him out of his shop over the years, after all.

Perhaps he could simply alter the desires of people who looked at Crowley with an eye to having some part of him—

Gracious Heavens.

Crowley stirred beside him. The angel welcomed the distraction with open arms, or at least a tentative pat on the ankle, and watched him burrow his face into the somewhat scratchy fabric of the sofa with a soft, sleepy grimace. Aziraphale miracled an exact replica of one of his satin bed pillows, nestled it beneath his cheek, and sat for a moment with the quiet loveliness of the image it created.

Crowley _trusted_ him. With his pain, and hope, and affectionate feet. He rescued books from Nazis. He thought of Hobnobs and tartans while planning escape routes from Satan. Aziraphale’s whole project was meant to be about _deserving_ that.

Dreams of dismemberment and emotional manipulation of the far weaker persons one was theoretically on earth to protect and love were Not Helpful to that end.

_Fear not, human. I bring you great joy. Unless you so much as glance at my personal property, an incorrigible, infernal demon with cute toes._

That was not how this was meant to go.

_And human, if the demon actually_ wants _you to look at him?_ _Or—more?_ A crushing, pinching pain that caught Aziraphale so deeply in his chest that he almost cried out.

As if Crowley were not literally a tempter _by profession._ As if Aziraphale had not _always known this_ and managed to get on with things for 6,000 years. As if Aziraphale had ever offered the demon so much as a kiss on the cheek.

Aziraphale had also always known that there were reasons for his complex systems of dams and canals, locks and levees, that went far beyond the wrath of Heaven. Covetousness. Envy. These were _sins._ The floodgates were there for a _reason._

Right.

Deserving love and trust was not simply a matter of attending to one’s own disastrous feelings, happily. Furthermore, most of the odious and potentially helpful books he’d been accepting Guidance from were safely locked in the back room, and disturbing Crowley from his much needed and aesthetically pleasing sleep by getting up was also Not Helpful in the project of deserving him.

All things considered, best to leave off the self-examination. For altruistic reasons.

Many other books had been stocked and displayed during the Great Bookshop Resurrection, and Aziraphale had been categorizing these as well, more out of curiosity than any conviction they’d been arranged to convey insight. Many of them were even copies of books that had already been on the shelves—in much more valuable, even priceless, editions. Those had been recovered, as well, but these were decidedly _reading_ copies.

Aziraphale looked longingly at the respectable but mass-produced illustrated version of _Gawain and the Green Knight_ he’d been cataloguing when Crowley came in. He could see it, playing out, games and exchanges and bartered kisses. Negotiations and honest confessions—with one exception for self-preservation, and so, of course, blood drawn at swordpoint. At the throat.

As seductive as that particular romance was (very, Aziraphale found, if somewhat confusing—not least the old woman waiting and watching in the castle, the most powerful witch in history somehow reduced to bossing and arranging for others’ pleasures), it did not have, by rights, the most immediate claim on Aziraphale’s attention.

The Deserve a Demon project likely required that he consider his friend’s behavior from some perspective other than how it affected Aziraphale’s own misbehaving feelings.

As one might do if one, say, loved and cared about a person and was not a complete incompetent.

Aziraphale closed his eyes and his face gathered into a pained expression. Because it was plain to Aziraphale that Crowley was not quite all right.

Of course Crowley was a demon. Of course he liked to go out at night, and when Aziraphale was _sane_ , he didn’t begrudge him that in the slightest, nor particularly want to accompany him.

But Crowley didn’t go out all night, turn up in the morning still drunk, barely able to stand—although not so drunk as to account for the instability—weave around his shop, half frozen, trembling, and castigate himself for all of it.

And he didn’t, as a rule, turn down Aziraphale’s company to do it.

That wasn’t covetousness speaking. That was just fact. But after a day of unparalleled triumph and an objectively lovely marathon lunch of the kind both he and Crowley valued above all else, Crowley had cut the evening short, lied about why, and left.

And all for what? Feeling “antsy.” Aziraphale was _certain_ that one word had actually been the cork on a bottle capping up a flood of other thoughts and fears and feelings, and he would have welcomed them all if they’d only been poured out to him.

That seemed unlikely to be forthcoming. Crowley was capable of being open about his feelings in a way that Aziraphale found astonishingly brave, but it was hardly his default setting.

_Listen to yourself…I don’t even like you…_

Aziraphale dropped his head in his hands and pulled at his hair hard enough to hurt. He _deserved_ it.

_Right. Fine. Yes. Have been incredible pillock, hurt adored friend, apologized, trying to atone by diverse means, including blankets. Next?_

But this wasn’t about that, Aziraphale considered, not on the whole. Crowley had been looking for him in the bookshop _after_ they’d quarreled. It was what he’d found instead. And now he’d gone into a full-blown panic—clammy hands, racing heartbeat, shaking—because Aziraphale, who had worked for centuries behind piles of books, often with a very high level of concentration, had been working behind a pile of books, concentrating.

Classic trauma response. If Crowley had been a human, Aziraphale would have been working to get him into counseling. He had the numbers of the best local practitioners. The neighborhood—and possibly his charming if somewhat misleading designation as a gay-owned business—often furnished customers in need of a bit of a talk, preferably with someone possessed of more emotional skills than Aziraphale himself could muster.

To this end, Aziraphale left various leaflets and information about help lines, therapists, and support groups lying about the shop, and had often escorted people to the kinds of meetings that tended to take place in church basements and have a lot of steps. 

But Aziraphale feared that all those methodologies relied on being open and honest about what was bothering one, and Crowley would need to—not do that.

Crowley could talk about his best friend dying, or almost dying, or rejecting him. But he couldn’t say his best friend refused to run away to the stars with him, or changed bodies with him so as to be tortured more survivably, or threatened to stop speaking to him _because Satan was coming._

They’d lock him up. And while that would be comically ineffectual, and the more bastard side of the angel would have paid good money for seats to that show, none of it sounded tremendously therapeutic.

Aziraphale glared at the self-help section. There was, of course, that.

If anything was ever going to go over like a lead balloon….

Perhaps if Aziraphale could become better informed himself _._ As with the rest of the twaddle, if it didn’t help, he wouldn’t be any _worse_ off. Carefully extracting himself from Crowley and his toes, Aziraphale grabbed his notebook, made his way to the shelf, plucked a book about Trauma and Your Partner ( _aspirational? closest proximate term?)_ and made his way to the back room.

Aziraphale began scrawling notes on a new page, suggestions on one side, comments and reflections on the other:

  * Don’t try to manage or cure— _C_ _hallenge._
  * Be with partner and do normal things— _S_ _trength._
  * Avoid triggers— _Challenge._ _Live and work in trigger. And yet, he’s sleeping here—consider further. More research re triggers_.
  * Calming presence— _S_ _trength._
  * Rebuild trust and sense of safety— _oh, very good, never would have occurred to me, thought perhaps to apply more trauma, toughen him up…_
  * Encourage new hobbies. _Wily adversary, dear, have you considered macramé?_
  * Express your commitment— _clear strength—joking. Nightmare scenario._ _See: Bandstand, various London streets and parks._
  * How to help someone having a panic attack: _miracle them to the Thames Embankment and/or apply custom divine blessing? Cuddle ankle? Further—_



“AZIRAPHALE!” As if on cue.

Crowley was sitting bolt upright on the sofa, frantically peering between the shelves and shadows, then turning to the window. The blanket was on the floor.

“Ah. Awake then, are you? Can I get you anything? Some tea?” _Surely tea was meant to be on the trauma help list?_

Crowley turned wide-eyed to Aziraphale, looked him up and down, and breathed a heavy sigh. He sank into the sofa and let his head fall back. “Fuck _me._ ”

“No, dear, I said ‘some tea.’ Bit of a slant rhyme, easy mistake,” said Aziraphale lightly.

Crowley’s laugh was warm if somewhat strangled. Aziraphale picked up the throw, folding and refolding it until a thin hand rested on its surface.

“It’s incredibly soft,” said Crowley in a low voice.

“New softness technology,” murmured Aziraphale. “Ingenious, really.”

“Good we kept them around, then.”

“What, blankets? Yes, they’re…cozy.”

“Humans, Aziraphale.” Crowley smiled. “I meant humans. But blankets as well.”

“Oh. Yes. Both still here. Well done, us.” They met each other’s gaze in a silence that spread warm and soft as the blanket they both still held.

Aziraphale was just thinking he might be content to spend the next several centuries exactly like that when Crowley dropped his hand, looked down, and somehow slouched up to a standing position.

“Right. Well. I’d better be off. Got—” he waved a hand, “things. Thanks for the sofa and the soft cushions, feeling much more solid. Carry on with your catnip cataloging. Sure I’ll see you soon.”

Azirphale felt the blanket slip from his hands as he watched Crowley stride purposefully to the door. All the soft warmth he’d been feeling slipped down or followed him out. _Don’t try to manage,_ repeated Aziraphale. _Don’t—_

“Oh, _bugger_ that. Crowley!” The door was already closing behind him, but the demon stopped dead in his tracks. The angel stamped his foot. “Get back in here this _instant!”_

Crowley turned and stared, a smile playing on his lips but a different look in his eyes altogether. “What a bossy angel.” He tilted his head. His voice sounded something like chocolate tastes.

“What a vexing demon.” Aziraphale crossed his arms and drummed his sleeve with his fingers. “Come here.”

“Or what?” Crowley walked toward him, slowly. But his breath was at a faster pace. He stopped in front of Aziraphale, a bit close.

“Or…I’ll be cross,” Aziraphale said, somewhat prim. Crowley smirked, as if that might not be the most threatening proposition he’d heard recently. So Aziraphale, much to his own shock, reached a hand up into Crowley’s hair and gave it a stroke, and then a tug. “As perhaps only a vexing demon can make me.” And he watched, calmly, as the smirk left Crowley’s face in exchange for something less mocking, if also less fathomable.

“But as you’re here, perhaps you do know what’s good for you after all.” Aziraphale dropped his hand and patted Crowley’s shoulder, feather light, before stepping back. “Crowley. I’m not meant to be taking charge, but—you do better with me right now. And I’m not meant to make this about me, I’m quite sure,” Aziraphale swallowed, because suddenly it was very much about him, and that was more difficult. “But you see—I’ve lost…some things, and yet despite some of my best efforts, I still have you, and whereas before, I got punched for even talking to you—”

“What.” Crowley started, eyes flashing. “ _When. WHO?_ ”

Aziraphale held up a hand, shook his head, and continued. “It was just—out there, after you’d said—you would never think of me again—but—that was before. The point is—that… business is over now, and you’re still here, and this—” he gestured between them, then around at the shop, and the world, “and so much more, _damn it,_ but it _is_ impossible to say just what I mean. _You_ said, though, that we’re on our own side, and that was so very—helpful, to me, and so today I thought, instead of your buggering off to do whatever fraternizing you come up with—our side could to go to Hackney.”

He paused, feeling flustered, and a little out of breath. Crowley, on the other hand, wasn’t breathing at all.

“I mean, for unhealthy food. As—an outing. We’ve not been to Hackney together since it was an actual village. It would be new, for us. Except—there’s a little restaurant where they know my name, but I know they think I’m lonely and I’d like to show them—I’m not.”

Aziraphale closed his eyes and let that settle a moment, the lightness and truth of it. “I’m not, now. And you won’t have a panic attack if I’m there, or if you do I’ll help you out of it, and there’s no point in pretending that it isn’t happening. So we should go there, and perhaps…record shopping, I think, after lunch.” 

“In Hackney,” Crowley repeated, voice sounding like a sweeter, more melted chocolate than before. A chocolate that, if it melted any more, would simply puddle and pool at the angel’s feet and not be a voice at all.

“Yes,” said Aziraphale, more firmly. “I thought you’d like that. I understand it’s meant to be ‘cool.’”

“I expect that means it’s over but…” Crowley quavered and made an admirable attempt at rolling his eyes, which was unsuccessful, but it did distract from a certain moistness around them. “Not the _worst_ place I’ve gone for you.”

“Excellent. I’ll get my coat.” Aziraphale turned, but a hand on his arm stayed him. He turned back. Crowley was staring at him with such an arresting combination of affection, amusement, and intensity that it was hard to move in any case.

“I haven’t agreed yet,” Crowley said in a low if steadier voice. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, angel. I have conditions.”

“Oh?” Aziraphale breathed.

Crowley nodded, amusement carrying the moment. “One, you absolutely must use the term ‘bebop’ in a music store in Hackney, or the deal’s off.”

Aziraphale raised his eyebrows, prim making a surprise comeback. “Why wouldn’t I? They’ll be contemporary record shops, surely.’”

“Yes. Absolutely. Hip to the bebop. Second.” Intensity took a commanding lead. Crowley removed his hand from where it had rested on Aziraphale’s arm and started to ball it into a fist, raising it slowly between them but letting his exhale direct it to fall to Aziraphale’s lapel. “Second, you’ll tell me all about who punched you in the stomach so hard that it was still sore yesterday when I was…there. And you’ll let me eviscerate whoever it was in a slow, painful fashion.”

Aziraphale shook his head. “As if you could. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It’s over and done with. Never mind it, Crowley.”

Crowley raised his eyebrows. “Ah, and that seems very much like me, does it?” He patted his hand on Aziraphale’s lapel for emphasis.

“Oh—perhaps not. But…after lunch?”

“ _During_ lunch.”

“Very well. But no talk of eviscerating. Puts me off. And they have _lovely_ baklava!”

“Bargain.”

It seemed the natural time to separate, perhaps leave the shop to pursue the lunch plan they had so meticulously negotiated. But the angel and the demon continued standing together in the middle of the bookshop, dust motes floating nothing at all like ashes or embers in the midday light.

“One more thing,” said Crowley, voice breaking.

“Pushy.” Aziraphale managed to huff and smile at the same time. “What is it? Or shouldn’t I ask.”

Too fast, Crowley said, “Let me kiss you on the forehead, right now, before I absolutely explode, which I promise would put you off lunch a bit more dramatically than a little evisceration chit-chat.”

Aziraphale turned a shade pinker and let out a breath of a laugh. “Wh—why?”

“Exploding demon—not a popular scent at the Harrod’s counter for a reason.”

“That’s not what I—” Aziraphale blinked.

“Because you’re an angel. But despite that, I’ve always suspected that deep down, you’re really a good—”

“Oh, shut it.” Aziraphale said, in absolute adoration. “I mean—and yes, of course, that is—I haven’t, or rather, no one—” He fluttered, hands looking for paper to twist.

It went like this, out of time. Not as either might have expected. Not in the same language they had been used to speaking.

*

“В лоб целовать -- заботу стереть.” Crowley stills twisting hands with one of his own, with the fingertips of the other touches Aziraphale’s temple, so slightly steadying, then the back of his head. He presses his lips to Aziraphale’s brow. “В лоб целую.”

“That’s—” Aziraphale’s breath comes fast, surprise and wonder in the shape of his smile. Lips on his skin are new to him.

“Russian, strangely” whispers Crowley, lips still—there, but moving.

“How lovely,” says Aziraphale. His hand finds its way to the back of Crowley’s head and pulls them brow to brow. “To—hear new things and—”

“Yes.” A minute, the two of them.

“I haven’t—” breathes Aziraphale.

“Read much twentieth-century Russian poetry, I expect.” Crowley laughs, not nervous but genuine, at the absurdity of him, of them, of the delight. “Some of it might be to your taste. You don’t know.”

“I don’t know,” said Aziraphale, “a great deal.” He finds Crowley’s gaze, keeps it, holds it in his own. “Tell me—does, would you translate it as misery, or worry?” He pauses. “That the—what it erases. The—kiss. I wouldn’t know, I don’t know the poem, or—”

“Or?”

“The rest of it,” whispers Aziraphale.

Crowley, hand ghosting from the back of the angel’s head. To the front, tracing the space where his own lips had been. The brow, the furrow there, the fold where anxiety gathers its forces. Crowley’s thumb follows its track. “Worry, I think. For you. Misery, might require something more. But is rarer.” He pauses. “Translation, not my strong suit. Too liable to think everyone speaks as a native.”

“Translation,” Aziraphale shakes his head, “sometimes forces choices that wouldn’t otherwise need be made.”

Gaze held. No motion. No minutes, maybe.

“Did you—” the angel asks presently, “did you—stop time, again? Is this a—demonic blessing, or rather—wiles, I suppose?”

Crowley shakes his head. “It isn’t anything but what it is. Bigger miracle, maybe.” A small smile, warm and fond to eternity. “‘I kiss your brow,’” he repeats, and does so.

_How astonishing_. Aziraphale closes his eyes. _To have the thing you want before you could ever have spoken it_. _Was it like that in Eden, not only before the apple, but before Adam got to naming?_

But wanting is its own pleasure. Aziraphale thinks about how close they are, how he could put his lips on Crowley’s, how he would like to. How he would put his tongue between those lips, into Crowley’s mouth, how he would like to, he thinks he would. He wants to stay with that, with the wanting. The doing might cancel the wanting. And there is so much he doesn’t know.

But a kiss on the forehead—erases worry, he thinks. It would not have occurred to him. It is written down, a moment saved, folded in paper, kept.

*

On the top of a bus to Hackney, the angel fussed at the demon Crowley about basketball players and baklava. The demon Crowley sat in the seat behind and leaned forward to whisper in the angel’s ear about an apple.

If Aziraphale, Crowley hissed, wanted to google NBA stats to impress the counter boys of Stoke Newington Road, he could bloody well learn to use an iPhone. The angel humphed resignedly, brow furrowed in concentration, and tried to make tiny words work with his thumbs.

“It’s not to impress them. It simply makes a connection. It’s nice. They _love_ Basket Ball.”

Crowley reached a hand down to dismiss a twee wicker home design store Aziraphale had managed to conjure. “Name an NBA championship team from the last five years.”

“The Celts, surely.”

“Celtics. Soft C. And no.”

“ _Soft_ C? Extraordinary. In any case. This isn’t complex. I perform all the necessary research in five minutes on a proper computer without—so many distractions.” Crowley’s hissing, close to his ear, for one. His arm reaching down over Aziraphale’s shoulder, another. Happiness, overall. Terribly unproductive.

“Dissstractions? There’s no one elsse up here with us, angel.”

“Serpents, for your information, are absolute rubbish at feigning innocence. Now. Do let me concentrate. It doesn’t matter the team. All you need, I’ve been trying to tell you, is to look up the key players relevant to the countries of origin of the staff. Now, it’s a Turkish restaurant—because I know you didn’t eat any beastly Doner this morning with your thwarted rentboy, and this is proper food.”

“You catty angel. And why rentboy? I never specified gender.”

“A wild guess, Crowley,” Aziraphale said acerbically. “But I’m sure you’re liable to cavort with all configurations.”

“Thank you, O Angel of Sexual Pansexual Tolerance. And I think you mean, ‘the young student you kindly assisted, Crowley.’”

“Quite. I rather misspoke. As I was saying, it’s a Turkish restaurant, but the ones who work there are often Greek, interestingly, or there’s a Serb or two, and several from Paris, where regardless of their heritage, they’re enthusiastic about a tall French player with long arms. I remember him, because people talk about wingspan and it’s difficult not to laugh. There are a few Serbian players, and a very famous Greek lad. So. You see. You google the name, find something a news article says they did, and then simply say ‘another triple double for Giannis, imagine that,’ or ‘Bogdanovic looked good in the paint last Friday,” as you order and—oh! The Frenchman blocked the young Greek’s shot. Twice! That should start a lively conversation, which generally means free baklava.”

“Angel.” Crowley leaned in just a fraction closer.

“Mmm?” Aziraphale made a great show of typing away with his thumbs.

“How much time do you generally devote to ressearching your flirtationss?” While Aziraphale was distracted by the sibilants in his ear, Crowley reached over lower, snatched his phone, and slouched back into his seat, a parody of sulking.

“Several millennia at least, by all appearances. Even in the first half of Coy Mistress, Marvell was in a bit of a rush, it seems to me.” Aziraphale twisted to face the seat behind him to better watch Crowley’s reaction—a pleased flush, a shake of denial, a resolute gaze at the passing buildings. “But I think—I _do_ think it will have been worth it, after all”

Crowley laughed. “Take _that,_ T. S. Eliot.”

“T. S. Eliot be _damned_ ,” said Aziraphale, with unexpected enthusiasm.

“Long taken care of, I can assure you,” said Crowley, smiling out the window. “But between that and your wiles, our job swap plans are shaping up very nicely.” 

“Very nicely indeed,” said the angel, taking advantage of the demon’s happiness to steal the iPhone back. “Apples everywhere, these days. So much to look forward to.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A kiss on the forehead--erases misery  
> A kiss on the forehead--erases worry  
> To kiss the brow is to wipe away anxiety
> 
> etc.
> 
> are some of the many ways to translate this line from a short poem by Marina Tsvetaeva, from Poems for Blok
> 
> Here's one relatively recent translation:
> 
> “A kiss on the forehead”  
> By Marina Tsvetaeva  
> translated by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine
> 
> A kiss on the forehead—erases misery.  
> I kiss your forehead.
> 
> A kiss on the eyes—lifts sleeplessness.  
> I kiss your eyes.
> 
> A kiss on the lips—is a drink of water.  
> I kiss your lips.
> 
> A kiss on the forehead—erases memory.
> 
> 1917


End file.
